Should we abolish black history month?

By Haines Brown, 24 December 2005

The interest in multiculturalism arose at the end of World War II,
when it was widely believed that ignorance about one's neighbors
in the world contributed to the racism, xenophobia, and nationalism
that served to justify wartime mass murder. Major efforts were
undertaken (such as by UNESCO) to encourage the kind of education that
would help people become more cosmopolitan and overcome the fears and
social insecurity that had fed the war.

It strikes me that things are a little more complicated than
this. There seem to be a variety functions that are served by
multicultural studies, and we can't very well discuss them without
taking these functions into account.

1. By becoming less parochial and narrow minded, one is able to
establish in the mind a relationship between one's own culture
and
that of other peoples. However, it is not a foregone conclusion
that one will see some other culture in a positive light; instead
one might learn to dislike that culture and reject its
customs. However, at least that dislike is now more rational and so
can be re-evaluated as necessary. It is often said that violence is
a manifestation of irrationality. I'm not sure that's
always true,
but at least a rational relation with others should reduce some
causes of violence.

2. Multicultural studies are sometimes taught with a bias that the
culture under study is in some way superior and necessarily
admirable. This, of course, is naive and probably one reason for
opposition to multicultural studies. However, passing such
judgements seems out of place, for we generally don't enter
social
relationships because of how we judge people, but because we share
interests with them. The interests and concerns we share with the
rest of the world makes it useful to enter into a constructive
relation with people of different cultures, and knowledge of these
cultures facilitates such a relationship; it does not require that
we pass judgement.

3. Another issue in multicultural studies, I suspect, has nothing to
do with the object of study because it offers a way to begin
looking upon our own culture as relative and subject to change. The
aim here is to liberate us from the tyranny of the past so that we
become masters of the future. Of course, for those two would prefer
to preserve old values, this flexibility might seem threatening,
but the fact is that culture and values always do change. Admitting
this does not mean that tradition has no importance. The implied
contradiction here between freedom and determinism here is an
ideological artifact and can't be presumed true; being able to
think critically about our culture does not counter the value of
the culture we inherit from the past.

4. Yet another issue is that multicultural studies can serve to
rectify an institutional disregard for cultural traditions that are
in fact important or are becoming more important in one's
social
and political environment. For education to adjust to emerging
social realities probably requires political intervention. So
there's nothing intrinsically wrong when those in leadership
positions, in politics and education, to point the institution in a
more positive direction. Education that would convery values out of
joint with the world will have betrayed the student.

5. While I believe that multicultural studies are useful and
necessary, they also seem to rest on a naive view of social
realities and systematically underestimates the importance of
economic and political interests. It almost seems that the ruling
class is trying to manipulate mass education in order to prevent
any potential threat to its own interests. The obvious need for
multicultural awareness obscures such an agenda behind
multicultural study. Some opposition to multiculturalism may be the
result of people's intuitive sense that it serves class
interests
other than their own, so it is important to decide whether
multicultural studies can have value independent of these
interests. .

We in fact live in a complex society and in a complex world, with
interdependency growing rapidly every year. So there can be nothing
virtuous about indifference to or ignorance of our social
environment. While our own culture remains of crucial importance in
our own lives, it is not because our culture is in some mysterious way
better than other cultures (it would be silly to suggest this, and it
is probably impossible to make value judgements about culture in any
case), but because of its real subjective value. This does not make
indifference to other cultures a virtue, nor is one's own culture
threatened by contact with other cultures.

Someone asked why it was necessary to have an African-American month
rather than include some African-American culture and history all year
long. Of course, it would be useful to embed multicultural aspects in
all fields of study, but there is a good practical reason to have a
day, week or month focused on a particular issue.

In many aspects life, a special period of time is set aside for us to
focus on something, and the advantage is that it provides a context
for its integration. That is, instead of having a culture broken up
into various topics (the history of, the sociology of, the art
of…), all these aspects are brought together thanks to a special
time and place set aside for the whole. For the same reason, it offers
a framework for people to join together and contribute their
particular insights, such as at international conferences.

> On Sun, 25 Dec 2005 16:53:14 +0000, Haines Brown thought
carefully and
> wrote:
>
>> …. Multicultural studies are sometimes taught with a
bias that
>> the culture under study is in some way superior and
necessarily
>> admirable.
>
> Well if it ever happened, it would be silly.
>
> Multicultural studies means “studying more than one
culture”. It
> would not be possible to teach MANY cultures “with a bias
that the
> cultureS under study is in some way superior and necessarily
> admirable.”

Yes, superficially my point sounds contradictory, but it is not in
fact. Multicultural programs usually imply the institutionalization of
several cross-disciplinary area studies taught by people specializing
in one area.

The people who teach these areas probably do so in part because they
are in love with their specialty, and that love probably contributes
to making their courses more interesting and stimulating for
students. Someone who teaches calculus probably loves math, and that
is a good thing. It seems necessary and beneficial for an area study
teacher to be personally biased in that for them the culture they
teach seems superior and admirable. My experience suggests that this
is the norm, not the exception.

The point of my remark is that this bias, as useful and necessary as
it may be for pedagogical reasons, is unscientific and can't be
used to support a comparative evaluation of the relative quality of
cultures (and so-called “civilizations” or
“races”). Someone's love of math does not imply that
math is somehow “better” than music. A teacher of East
Asian studies knows that his enthusiasm for the area is his own
personal bias, and this does not imply that Caribbean studies is about
an inferior people or culture.

In short, as a teacher, you know that your bias toward your subject
has primarily to do with a personal relationship between you and the
subject that you teach, and it has nothing to do with anything
intrinsic to the subject itself. It is not a matter of science, but of
a personal relationship.

Of course one can compare specific features of cultures, such as their
complexity or age, but this is not an evaluation, but the comparison
of the results of measurements. Languages, an important part of
culture, tend to evolve in the direction of simplification, not
complexity, while cultures as a whole probably become more complex as
the circle of our social interactions has widened over time. So
complexity is not a good or bad thing, and is not a necessary trend
for cultural evolution, but is feature appropriate to specific
circumstances.

Some people have objected to area studies because the fascination and
love for the culture that a teacher would instill in his students
strikes them as being in some way a threat or betrayal of the dominant
culture of their nation. The word “treason” has even been
used. In principle, this charge strikes me as invalid, for the study
of outside cultures only widens our cultural horizon and does not
replace our own culture by some other culture; cultures are not in
competition because there are no cultural wholes that a competition
seems to require. However, the dominant culture in one's nation
probably has an ideological function, and this function seems to
require that it be seen as intrinsically superior. This ideological
function is indeed challenged by one's becoming more
cosmopolitan. But this has nothing to do with science, but with
ideological hegemony.

To address a point you may want to raise at this point, our often
arbitrary and subjective demarcation of a subject of study does not
imply that it corresponds to an objective coherence. But this is a big
and difficult topic. A term such as “Caribbean Studies”
should not imply that there's a single culture in the
Caribbean. On the other hand, I can't agree with historians who
would dismiss the term “feudalism” as an empty
convenience, for in this case we are talking about a system. A
“culture” is not a system, but a set of persistent
behaviors and symbols that are probably not even coherent or
consistent.

I wouldn't have expected you to doubt my assumption of a personal
bias among people teaching in a multicultural program, and I thought
you would instead have strongly objected to my casual remark that
there's no objective basis for the comparative evaluation of the
intrinsic quality of cultures (or now, also
“civilizations” and “races”).